Friday, March 17, 2006

Aaarrr...faith and Gomorrah

Goddamn begathon PBS infomercials won't stop. Motherf(*%^@#&%&^$s!

Eleven stories below Amateur Night rages on, horns yelling, sirens. I'm rather glad to have gotten home, be here, with the glow of the green band of lights around the Hancock building filtering in the windows, and not amongst so many people weaving unsteadily around me. Toward me.

Do you ever feel like you'll go insane if you watch even one second of Friends? Like if you let in even one smidge of it in your house through your TV something terrible will happen? Especially the early episodes, and you catch 1/2-a-sec of Jennifer Aniston in one of her milkmaid Central Park uniforms. In the end that show was only ever about her nipples, as Janeane Garofalo said.

I feel the need for Doris Day right now, so the pad is rockin to the hip, 21st-century sounds of Please Don't Eat the Daisies. Sometimes you just gotta. (That is, there's a little Doris Day in everyone, to paraphrase David Lee Roth about Van Halen.) Especially when you're 1/2-stuck in an MRI machine (why the slight gap in postings here) you need Doris Day, and I don't even mean the big band/MGM Doris, I mean the serious pastel-colored shit from the Everybody Loves a Lover years.

In the slightly same vein: another fav good/bad move sighting. Yours, Mine and Ours, and YES I mean the version with Henry Fonda, Lucille Ball, a young Tim Mathieson and helpless ol queeny Van Johnson. I find the movie notable for two reasons: Lucille Ball, who was (I just looked it up) *57* playing the role of a widow with 8 kids who during the course of the movie gets pregnant. It's just sad and heroic to watch this woman whose voice is already dissolute from cigarettes slog ahead in this old-trouper, a-job's-a-job, the-first-rule-of-show-business-is-to-show-up way in a role she couldn't be less suited for, not just because of age but because the character is supposed to be so darned wholesome. She's so miscast, silly housewifey bows in her hair, but so old Hollywood/valiant about the whole thing. Hilarious. Same could probably said about Henry Fonda, really. And TWO, it's funny because somebody from the RNC? or something surely must have handed the studio funding to make this movie, it's so anti-hippy, and such your basic abstinence film, in long form. THIS is what sex and romance is about, trumpets Henry Fonda, as he leads his pregnant wife to the hospital...daily life and the diapers, not soft music and candlelight. Which, well, is true, but he's telling his daughter who's sobbing because moments before her boyfriend tried to go too far. Fonda just seems furious, not smug. Somebody is trying very hard at the last gasp of the sixties to hang on to something that was sliding by (the scenes set in SF and Henry Fonda's far-out sexy date).

Chefography series on Food TV satisfying, very True Hollywood Story in structure (turgid repetitive 2-minute ins-and-outs, silly voiceovers), but satisfying. Gaps in useless TV chef biographical knowledge filling in. Haven't finished the Ina Garten one yet, but--so far, no mention of Martha Stewart and her role in things. Was there another marfa rift there? Maybe there's not enough room for two hostessqueens in East Hampton.

Dining: veers into the category of entertainment these days, so needs must report this evening a grand adventure at Tru. Did *not* actually put myself willy-nilly in the chef's hands (no tasting menus; a la carte), and ended up with conventional-sounding but spot-hitting lobster risotto, prime rib, glass of champagne, glass of beautiful smoky red, small cheese plate, desserts for-fucking ever (including a dessert course amuse bouche, even a la carte), and those two little Tru cakes to take home for breakfast. I loved it. It was absurdly spendy, and just slightly tackily so in ways I don't feel like thinking about right now, and I did it basically cause I wanted to, even though it was a birthday dinner for friend (they even customised our *menus* with her name), and no amount of justification can credit that many dollars dying so that we may dine, but what the hell. The lamb chops my friend had were unfuckinbelievable. And I had an image of myself swimming laps in the risotto in its adorable copper pot. It was so chewy, savory, hot.

"Get down girl, go head, get down!" I continue to yell Kanye-ly at my cats when they Get on the Table. Doesn't impress. Only master they really obey appears to be my housekeys when I shake them.